Nvidia launches Quadro RTx based on Turing architecture

NVidia Quadro RTx chips is being claimed to be the hottest thing that company has come up since they unveiled the Cuda architecture back in 2006.

Nvidia took the wraps off its new Turing architecture which the company said is a generation ahead of anything they have come up with so far. Also, of course, the company had three new workstation graphics cards based on the new Turing architecture to show off during the Siggraph keynote address.

One of the biggest highlights of the new Quadro RTx GPUs is that they feature the company’s new RT Cores with RT referring to Ray Tracing. That, in turn, points to a method of rendering where the ray of light is traced following its interaction with other objects in a scene. The Ray Tracing bit, however, shouldn’t come as a surprise given that this has been in the news for some time now.

According to Nvidia, the three chips – Quadro RTx 8000, Quadro RTx 6000 and Quadro RTx 5000 makes for a considerable performance improvement over Pascal based cards when it comes to simulating real-world scenarios. On a rough estimate, the performance improvement can be pegged at around a factor of 6 when compared to Pascal cards.

Ray Tracing, however, isn’t the only breakthrough technology that the new Quadro RTx chips boast of. For there also is the AI based Tensor cores that the new chips benefit from and which together makes for Ray Tracing in real time to improve by a factor of 25 compared to Pascal based chips. That again should be enough of a justification when Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang described the new hybrid rendering capability of the Quadro RTx chips to be far greater than even the best CUDA GPU the company has ever produced.

The real benefits of the two new computational engines – Ray Tracing and Tensor Cores is also far greater than even Nvidia might be admitting at the moment. Rather, the company right now seems more eager to showcase all the improvements the new chips can bring about to the visual effect segment. As company CEO Huang said, the chips can deliver ‘cinematic-quality interactive experiences, amazing new effects powered by neural networks and fluid interactivity on highly complex models.’

The three chips, however, aren’t exactly affordable. The cheapest of the lot is, of course, the Quadro RTx 5000 and is priced $2300 whole next higher up is the Quadro RTx 6000 which is priced at $6300. The top of the line Quadro RTx 8000 comes for a whopping $10000.